Chemical reactions are often written as simple equations: starting materials go in, and a product comes out. In reality, the samesubstrates can follow many different pathways depending on their concentrations, temperature, catalysts, and other conditions.

Exploring all of these possibilities by hand is practically impossible. Now, advances in laboratory automation and chemical artificial intelligence are allowing researchers to systematically map this vast “reaction hyperspace”—and uncover chemistry that may have remained hidden even in reactions studied for more than a century.

In the International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing, researchers have built a flexible and ultra-fast artificial synapse printed entirely from room-temperature liquid inks that dissolves on demand in six minutes. The work shows that high-performance and brain-inspired hardware does not require extreme vacuum chambers, rare metals, or permanent electronic waste.